NSIS originally came about quite some time ago when Nullsoft (the original makers of WinAmp) needed an installer to make it easy to install WinAmp plug-ins. All of this, AND it needs to be easy to use by you as a developer, and even where possible integrate with your Visual Studio or other development tools’ workflow. It will allow you to stamp your mark and/or company logo on it, customise the dialogs to ensure that all information needed by your application is collected, and that standard things such as start menu entries and shortcuts are easy to create. that’s billions and billions of Windows-based machines, with staggeringly different amounts of memory, hard drive space, CPU speed, and installed software, all with subtle, slight differences in Windows configuration, and you have to be able to run on ALL of them! A good install maker will guide you through common operations, such as telling the system which files your application consists of, or what prerequisites it needs to ensure are installed. Why? Well, you need to make sure that you can set up and get your software running on ANY configuration of Windows and hardware on the planet. In fact, it’s probably orders of magnitude more difficult that writing standard application software. What Makes a Good Install Maker?Ĭreating software installers is hard, very hard. Being able to produce a great looking, simple to use, installation experience will keep customers coming back to you for other software, and it’ll win you many kudos points in the customer support and experience stakes. In the enterprise and desktop markets, there is still an ongoing need for custom-written applications in WPF, and as I previously mentioned, some web apps are shipped out on a DVD for an end user to install on their own web servers. That’s not to say that there’s no place for installers any longer, however. Understandably, in this day and age of web applications, it’s becoming somewhat less common to see installers, because a large chunk of the software we interact with these days we consume via our web browser of choice. Providing an installer for your software is something that’s very often overlooked by many developers but which can actually add a very professional final touch to your application before it’s unleashed onto the general public. Those applications (typically called ‘setup.exe’) that, when run, give you that obligatory small dialog box with the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons in the bottom-right corner, which asks you where on your hard drive you want to install the application, and any other questions that may be required, such as license key entry. We’ve all seen them at some stage or another. I won’t include any that only do “30 days free” or that are crippled but useable in a limited fashion, and where a commercial product is mentioned, it should NOT be seen as an endorsement of that product. I will include some that are commercial, but only because they have a genuinely fully free mode. NET platform today.Īs with other similar articles, I’ll only be looking at free-to-use offerings. Because of this, and a number of questions asked in the Linked.NET Virtual Users group (Lidnug) that I help run, I’ve decided to do a quick rundown of the install makers that are currently available to developers working on the. There’s actually not a large amount of web applications that are 100% publicly accessible.Ĭonsider also that a lot of web-based applications increasingly depend on Windows-based service applications running on the same machines as the web applications in question, providing access to various back-end services that are simply not available to the front-end, web-based code. However, the very opposite is true a lot of web applications are still shipped out to organisations to run on their own internal web servers. In this day and age of web applications, you might be forgiven for thinking that we don’t require software installation applications any longer.
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